Odouring foodscapes, ordering gender: Mapping women and caste in Samskara and The Weave of My Life

Abstract

abstract The article locates the caste-spaces in India through the sensoriality of smell emitted by food in different gastronomical zones and its influence on the socio-political condition of Dalit women. It focuses on the embedded olfactory value of food to inform the contested nature of the Indian caste system and enables an understanding of the gendered aspect of the caste-spaces. By examining caste as spatial, sensorial and corporeal, the article confronts the crucial gaps in caste and food studies by deconstructing the order and odour of foodways in U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (1976) and Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs (2008). While critiquing the caste system narrative, the selected texts map different olfactory zones in intercultural culinary landscapes. The article argues how the caste society is built on the gastronomic idea of ‘we are/smell what we eat’ by mapping the ways in which the two texts explore the physical and sensorial consumption of food in different socio-cultural spaces. It is argued that gendered meanings around smell are invariably connected to the caste system, and that Dalit women’s relationships to food and smells should be foregrounded in the olfactory politics of caste. The article traces the ways in which smellscapes highlighted in the selected texts create invisible boundaries of spatial and moral stratification (order) through the invisible medium of smell (odour). It also situates the praxis of deodorisation as a tool of dissent by Dalits, and especially Dalit women. The article raises critical inquiry into how the olfactory effect of food is not just a chemical by-product, but rather a symbolic agent which can work both to oppress − through spatial and corporeal discourses − or be opened up to rigorous inquiry.